


pentad

by coyoterodeo



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, mako is awesome (as usual), raleigh doesnt cope with grief well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 21:53:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1363048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coyoterodeo/pseuds/coyoterodeo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>pentad (noun).</i> a group of five; a period of five years.<br/>Or, each year, the anniversary of Yancy's death is always a little bit different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pentad

**Author's Note:**

> aka, my obligatory contribution to the raleigh manpain fandom, or something like that. unbeta'd and sparsely edited, mostly because i got tired of looking at it, so read at your own risk. hmu on tumblr @eisenhowerofficial for questions or concerns

The first year, Raleigh doesn’t even register that the anniversary has passed until it’s too late.

The leap year makes it harder to memorialize, but it’s March 7th when his fingers brush the edge of one of Yancy’s old sweatshirts and he realizes that he missed the date—his brother has now been dead for exactly one year, and one week. 

He is furious at himself for forgetting. The monotony of work on the Wall, the strain of daily survival, left him numb and ignorant of the passage of time, and he is enraged. He clutches Yancy’s dog tags in his fist and punches madly at a mirror in the barrack bathroom. The glass shatters and blood runs across his knuckles and the rough hands of his supervisor shove him stumbling into the snow, an exile again, sent away in a fit of madness and terror and desperation. He yells and kicks and shouts like a child, hammering his hands raw against the concrete side of the building, the sharp edge of the metal card digging into the flesh of his palm. The Alaskan night is freezing and he is so angry—with himself, with the supervisor, with the PPDC, with the world—he is so _angry_ he can hardly think.

The fury cools fast, however, like hot iron thrust into the frigid air, and his anger rapidly subsides into despair. He presses his forehead against the wall, opens his fist to let the silver dog tag dangle from his fingers, and sinks into the blank snow on his knees. Yancy’s sweatshirt is soft and warm in his shaking hands, and it is the last pathetic remnant he has of his big brother. 

Raleigh curls over it and sobs until he can’t fucking breathe.

\- - - 

The second year, he tries to mourn properly.

He doesn’t go to work on the Wall that morning. He won’t get a ration card, but a day of fasting is worth it for Yancy—not enough for Yancy. It is March 1st and his brother has been dead for exactly 730 days, leap years be damned.

The Wall has moved to Sheldon Point, which isn’t as much of a city as it is a northern outpost with an airport. He stands on a cliff overlooking the tumbling icy waters of the Yukon delta, where the river meets the sea. Yancy’s dog tag hangs from his hand.

Even with the muffler wrapped thick around his neck, the wind bites at his face savagely. The snow crunches under his books and he can hear the distant noises of the Wall—the clanging of steel, the whining of machinery. There is a shout, a bark of orders, and Raleigh closes his eyes.

“Christ, Yance,” he begins thickly, opening them again. The cold air stings and he is surprised by the sound of his brother’s name on his tongue, somehow unfamiliar in the roaring winter. The dog tag swings in the gale.

“I, uh,” he tries again, voice wavering. “I don’t really know what to say.” As copilots, they didn’t talk much because they didn’t have to—the Drift is silence, after all, and when someone has been inside your head, you’re often at a loss of things to discuss. But with Yancy’s last words constantly ringing in his ears, Raleigh regrets all of the things he left unsaid, all of the things he left up to the Drift to communicate. He has spent endless sleepless nights wishing he could go back, not even to save him, but to just tell him everything—everything they knew, but never said.

And now, he can’t think of a damn thing to say. The irony hits him hard and a choked laugh escapes his chest, bitter and bereaved. “I miss you,” he tries to say, but there is a lump in his throat he just can’t push past and he’s not sure if the tears in his eyes are from the grief or the wind.

“I know…you’d want me to try,” he gets out finally, voice cracking and faltering in all the wrong places. “So this is me. Trying.”

He extends his arm over the chasm, the dog tag dangling like an offering, and shuts his eyes.

He is going to send it back to the sea, with Yancy, where it belongs. His brother’s body is somewhere beneath those crashing waves, and it only seems fitting to return the pendant to its owner.

Except—except—his fingers won’t cooperate, the refuse to open—it is like they are frozen around the metal ball chain, unmoving and unwilling to unfurl. He opens his eyes and they snag over the _BECKET, YANCY_ engraved on the swinging silver badge, and his breath hitches.

“Shit,” he mutters, through clenched teeth. His fingers fumble around the dog tag as he quickly retracts it from the edge and shoves it into his palm, suddenly paralyzed by the thought of losing it.

“I’m sorry, Yance,” he says, and this time his voice shatters. “I can’t do it. I’m sorry.”

He swallows hard and steps back away from the edge, dropping to a seat in the snow. The cold from the ground seeps up into his bones, but Yancy’s tag is warm in his fist, slick with sweat.

Raleigh bows his head and weeps, childishly wiping his cheeks and nose with the heel of his hand. His fingertips trace over the letters of his brother’s name, and he wants to hold onto them, to tie them to the sound of his laugh and the cadence of his stride. The idea of sending this piece of him back to the ocean, back to the waters filled with kaiju and kaiju blood and kaiju shit, now makes him want to vomit.

It has been two years since Yancy Becket died. The wind howls and the sea roars, all but drowning out the sounds of the boy in the snow, crying for his lost brother. 

\- - -

The third year he is back in Anchorage, which is both good and bad.

Bad, because it’s fucking Anchorage—the Ice Box is painfully visible from the top of the Wall, and to look the other way is to stare straight into the same waters that took his brother.

Good, because it’s an actual, real city (of which Alaska has a dire deficiency), with actual, real bars.

Mourning properly didn’t really work out for him the last time around, so he decides to get shitfaced properly.

The bar is loud and dirty and raucous, but he tunes it out soon enough. He drinks to forget; he drinks until all he knows is how to throw a punch and block a blow, and then pisses off an asshole with a temper. Pain explodes across his face as his nameless opponent’s fist arcs up and crashes into the underside of his jaw, but Raleigh winds up for the returning swing with an idiot’s grin. He feels so stupidly _alive,_ more so than he has in years.

He gasps as a well-placed blow lands square over his chest, but recovers quickly. Vagrant worker or not, he was still a jaegar pilot once, and was trained extensively in martial arts. His skills and experience in hand-to-hand combat vastly supersede those of his peers, even while he’s hammered.

That fact becomes apparent when he manages to wrestle his opponent into a headlock, kneeing his sharply in the ribs and using his center of gravity to flip him to the ground. He is vaguely aware of the crowd cheering around him and he rocks back on his heels, swaying with his inebriation.

The fallen man stands back up on shaky footing, but looks at Raleigh with a new sort of fury. He is built—a full three inches taller than the ex-pilot, and probably twenty pounds heavier—but Raleigh is quick and decisive, each move precisely calculated, always anticipating the enemy’s response. He’s fought fucking kaiju before; he can handle a belligerent drunk.

The alcohol has made him sloppy, however, and he only has time to brace himself for impact when the stockier man charges and rams him against the back wall. A volley of punches slams into his rib cage, and for a few seconds he struggles futilely against his opponent’s greater mass and iron grip. He catches a break when his foot comes up to kick the man in the gut, and the hit sends him staggering backwards.

Released from his attacker’s hold, Raleigh swiftly delivers two punches to his face, in rapid succession. The combatant stumbles backwards, clearly left at a disadvantage. With a final surge of adrenaline, Raleigh’s fist comes forward and connects sharply with the man’s jaw, sending him staggering. His adversary crashes backwards into tables and chairs, glasses shattering across the floor as the furniture comes clattering down, and the crowd erupts into riotous hollering.

He stands, chest heaving, before his defeated contender, who has one arm draped over an overturned table and is blinking dazedly at the scene around him. “Fuck you,” he finally manages to slur out when he comes to. The gathering laughs, and Raleigh pants with the exertion and pride of a brawl’s victor.

His triumph is short-lived, however, as he suddenly feels the violent shove of a royally pissed bartender. He ends up tripping down the steps outside as ungracefully as ever, and somehow lands in a forgotten, snowy alley, where a trash can lies overturned a few yards away. He leans over and spits, pink strings of saliva and blood dangling from his lips, and he tastes iron. His knuckles stain the snow red and his face aches and stings and smarts in every way, but it all makes him feel more alive and _real_ than ever.

The wind bites and his skin and he laughs, loud and drunk. He won. He _fucking_ won. He’s been sitting on the top of a goddamn wall for three years and he can still hold his own in a fight. That counts for something, right?

Yancy would probably kick his ass for this, he muses, laughter subsiding into quieter chuckles. He’d yell and tell him how he was being stupid, how he was going to lose his job, how he—

 _Fuck,_ Yancy.

Raleigh pitches forward and vomits. 

\- - -

The fourth year, the date burns in the back of his mind like a branding iron.

 _Thursday, February 29 th, 2024_ screams at him from the tattered community calendar in the barracks. He can hear movement around him—workers rolling out of bunks, getting dressed, shuffling out for another day of monotonous labor—but he stares at the date penned in red for a long time, fingernails digging into his palm.

_february 29 th activity in the breach category III kaiju codename_

Homer, Alaska is a miniscule town, housing barely 5,000 people, but it needs protection, just like everywhere else. Still, Kachemak Bay is relatively calm compared to the thrashing, icy waters of the open Pacific. The Wall follows Route 1, winding down the peninsula coastline, and Raleigh finds himself looking out across the inlet, towards the opposite landmass.

_category III kaiju codename_

The wilderness is deafening in its silence and he wonders what kind of kaiju would attack fucking _Homer._ Kaiju go for the populous cities—Anchorage, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles— _those_ are the Pacific cities the United States should focus on protecting. But there’s talk of shutting down the Ice Box and plans to incorporate the L.A. Shatterdome into the Long Beach Anti-Kaiju Wall construction, so the strategy of guarding isolated cities has started to fall by the wayside.

_codename_

He wonders, sometimes, what he’s doing here—why he’s spent the last four years of his life building a wall that defends mostly abandoned oil fields and wildlife reserves. Hell, construction started in Nome, and no kaiju has even been spotted remotely that far north. But the Kaiju War had always been a part of his life, ever since his family sat in front of the T.V. and watched Trespasser demolish San Francisco on K-Day, and after Yancy ( _Yancy_ ) died, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go.

_codename_

To remain in the Jaegar program would have been impossible. He didn’t want to drift again, he _couldn’t_ drift again, he—

_codename knifehead yancy wake up movement in the breach come on we’re being deployed kaiju’s a category III biggest one yet codename_

He squints against the bright blast of the welding gun, blinding even behind the thick, tinted glass of his goggles. The Jaegar program is going downhill, anyways. The UN is slashing through funds because everyone is so excited about this damn wall. Pentecost is probably pissed as hell.

_knifehead what time is it two am yep whattaya say another notch on the belt come on becket time for the drop hey kid_

There is a headache building deep between his eyes.

_don’t get cocky_

The ground is firm beneath his feet as he slides down from a beam, like a fireman slides down a pole. The snow has begun to pick up. The dilapidated, decades-old radio in the barracks predicted just as much. _February 29 th 2024 expect light snow, due to get heavier in the afternoon around 3 P.M._

_hey yance today only comes once every four years right let’s kick some kaiju ass_

_good morning becket boys gentlemen your orders are to hold the miracle mile off the coast of anchorage sir there’s still a civilian vessel in the gulf you know what i’m thinking i’m in your brain i know then let’s go fishing_

_it went through the hull raleigh listen to me you need to raleigh listen to me raleigh_

_yancy YANCY OH GOD OH GOD YANCY WHERE ARE YOU OH GOD YANCY PLEASE OH GOD OH_

His chest constricts and he stumbles, barely catching himself on a railing before slamming into the icy ground. He rights himself and treads into the mess hall, where a shitty television blares the latest news over the mass of voices. The date sits like a sentinel in the upper right corner of the screen.

That night, Raleigh finds the one and only bar in Homer and blows his entire ration card on beer.

 - - -

The fifth year, his habit of being in Alaska for the anniversary of Yancy’s death is broken.

His habit of getting absolutely wasted, however, is not.

Which… wasn’t exactly his brightest idea, he thinks dully, as he lays sprawled out across the asphalt. His head still throbs from a forceful impact with the countertop, and his ribs ache with every shuddering inhale.

With a strangled grunt, he manages to push himself from his pathetic spread eagle position on his stomach to a slightly more dignified curl on his side. The exertion from the simple motion takes everything out of him, however, and for a few minutes all he can do is breathe measuredly through his nose and try not to throw up.

Tonight didn’t exactly go as planned. He’s not really sure if he even had a plan aside from “get fucking hammered and don’t think about Yancy” in the first place, but lying in the fetal position on some forgotten New York backstreet definitely wasn’t part of it.

He coughs, wincing at the jarring of his chest and ribs. New York is warmer than Alaska in early March, though probably not by much, he thinks irritably. Fat snowflakes drift down lazily around him. He shivers, and curls deeper into himself.

A car alarm sounds in the distance, and Raleigh lets his mind wander. Yancy would be so fucking pissed at him for this—for memorializing his death in like, the shittiest way possible, and for abandoning Mako.

His stomach clenches with guilt at the thought of her name. _Shit,_ he thinks, scrambling stupidly to stand. _Shit._ He’s an asshole, a real fucking asshole—because nothing says “I value you as a person and friend and probably something more” better than callously abandoning your colleague after an unbelievably draining press appearance without giving any indication of where you were going or why you were so _angry._ Christ, what if she’s looking for him, what if she needs him, what if—

The sudden change in altitude causes him to stagger dangerously, and he grips the corner of the brick building to right himself. The world lurches around him in erratic beats, and he blinks rapidly, wincing at the sharp pain in his head and sides. With a harsh gasp, he pushes himself out of the shadowed alley and stumbles into the white wash of the streetlight.

Raleigh watches as his breath curls up into the darkness, illuminated with the snowflakes by the beams. A car alarm sounds in the distance. He shivers intensely. He lost his coat at some point during the night, and New York winters are not forgiving for those in loose-knit sweaters.

He moves in a broken, shambling gait, each swinging step causing his head to spin. Christ, it’s cold. He’d shove his hands in his pockets, if he wasn’t so worried about eating shit on the pavement.The hotel is only six or seven blocks away, but his pace is painfully slow, and he comes so dangerously close to falling on a number of occasions that he has to take the time to stop and steady himself. His mind reels in the silence, and he tries desperately not to think about Yancy.

He’s about ten minutes out when he hears the sudden screech of tires and the opening of a car door. There is a pattering of quick steps, the rapid _taps_ of heels on pavement, and he looks up to see Mako, framed in the light of the street lamp, white snowflakes dusting the top of her head. She rushes forward to brace him.

“M’sorry,” he mumbles into her hair, listing precariously against her as her arm drops to the small of his back, offering support. She says nothing, only guides him with immeasurable strength and patience to the hastily parked vehicle. The guilt comes crashing down again, and it threatens to swallow him whole. Mako shouldn’t have to come peel him off the curb of some godforsaken sidestreet at three in the morning just because he doesn’t make the best life decisions when he’s sad.

“You’re freezing,” she says, her voice low and firm, and her fingers briefly brush over his, bone white from the cold. She is warmer than him—a rare happening. “Where is your coat?”

His shoes scuff along the sidewalk. “I, uh,” he starts, hoarse. “Think I lost it somewhere.”

Mako does not grace him with a reply, only carefully lowers him into the passenger seat and closes the door, heels clicking on the concrete. She is still in the outfit from their interview earlier in the day. Raleigh wonders idly why she didn’t change, and hopes fervently that it wasn’t because she was worried about him.

Mako slides into the driver’s seat with a certain grace and switches the ignition without a word. The engine roars to life and the heat begins blasting, and Raleigh slumps pitifully against the door. He is too big for the rental car—his body folds at odd angles and his knees knock against the dashboard—but he is at least safe and not alone, two things that could not have been said about the previous years.

The drive is short, perhaps only five minutes, but Mako’s silence unnerves him. He glances to her often with his one good eye, but her gaze remains steadfastly fixed on the road, her hands wrapped tight on the steering wheel, and Raleigh doesn’t dare break the still. They enter the hotel without comment, and she leads him through the lobby with stunning composure as the receptionist gapes.

When they finally dip back into solitude in the confines of the elevator, Raleigh nearly sighs with relief. He chances another look at Mako, hoping to catch her eye, but she watches the floor numbers light up with such resolute and unwavering purpose that he doesn’t think anything short of a kaiju attack could make her look away.

She’s angry with him—but that much was expected. The remorse claws at him like a caged animal and he searches desperately for an appropriate apology. None seem fitting. _Hey, sorry I ditched you after our interview today to get hammered, I do it every year, it’s kind of just a thing with me because I haven’t quite learned how to handle my fucking issues in a constructive manner. Probably should have warned you about that before we hopped into a Jaegar together, my bad._

The warm glow of the hallway presents a welcome change from the harsh lighting in the lobby, but Raleigh feels out of place in the quiet environment, a mangled, bloody mess intruding into a peaceful and slumbering world. He treads softly, and the low click of Mako’s key card is the only sound that violates the cottony silence.

She sits himon the edge of her bed and he shifts, trying not to ruin her sheets with blood or dirt. There are signs of sleeplessness everywhere—the tea on the bedside table, the notes scattered across the desk, the bed still made—and the guilt washes over him again, like the tide returning from the sea.

Mako strides back, dragging a swivel chair behind her, and rolls two aspirins into his palm. He pushes them back. “Don’t need them,” he tries, but her gaze is sharp and piercing. He reluctantly tips his hand to his mouth and swallows the pills dry.

She sits in her chair with the medical kit in her lap and makes quick work of his face, dabbing the cuts with a wet paper towel and then dousing them in disinfectant. He winces at the burn, but he welcomes the physical contact—her fingers dancing across his skin, delicate yet capable. Her touch grounds him.

With dexterous ease, she applies a butterfly bandage to the angry laceration arching across his forehead and then leans back, examining her handiwork. Although he is sure it is flawless, she frowns.

“You look terrible,” she states, looking him over with an odd mixture of fading anger and concern. Raleigh tries a smile.

“’Terrible’s a strong word,” he replies. He attempts to catch her gaze, but the hard set of her brows reminds him that he isn’t out of the doghouse yet. His grin fades.

Mako watches him for a while, emotions hidden beneath her steely front, and finally sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I am sorry,” she begins, haltingly. “Today is… difficult for you.”

He snorts, then cringes at the pain it sends bubbling between his eyes. “Yeah,” he answers, “but that doesn’t mean you should have to play search-and-rescue with me at 3 A.M. on a Saturday night.”

She smiles—it’s a small, sad smile, a slight upturn of her lips that cannot mask the sorrow and worry in her eyes, but it’s a smile, and Raleigh counts it as a victory. He mimics the expression, doing his best to appear fine, for her sake.

Mako sighs again and looks at her hands. They sit wordlessly in the dim room, the tired tension rolling between them, until the silence becomes so overwhelming that Raleigh feels like he has to break it.

“I’m sorry,” he says. The words carve a hole in his chest as they rise from his throat and they leave him gutted and empty. “Christ, I’m sorry—“

Her arms wrap around his torso suddenly, and he blinks as her head comes to rest atop his shoulder. There is a moment of stunned indecision as he feels the rise and fall of her chest against his, the way her heart thumps rhythmically against his ribs, the foil to the erratic beat of his own. Slowly, he reciprocates the action, leaning forward and hooking his arms across her upper back. His hands stretch across the fabric of her shirt, and their knees knock as she inches the chair closer. Her presence surrounds him like undeserved grace and he can’t help but wonder where he would be without her; what shithole of a bar in Alaska he’d be collapsed outside of this year.

Something in him breaks at that, like a leaf finally falling from a branch, and he buries his face urgently into the crook of her neck.

Mako’s hand comes up to rest against the base of his skull, her fingers threading through his short hair, and he clings to her tightly, with impossible desperation. Each breath he takes leaves him shuddering at his core and he feels the burn of heavy tears behind his eyelids but he won’t, he won’t—he just holds her like she’s the last thing keeping him safe and sound, the steady tug of gravity that stops him from spiraling out of orbit. The metaphor is frighteningly accurate.

They sit there for what feels like years, her hand rubbing the back of his head absently and his arms locked rigid across her shoulders. Her palm rises from the small of his back to the base of his neck, where it comes to rest over his collarbone, like a guardian. They pull away, and she presses her forehead against his.

“It’s okay,” he tries to say, but the words stick in his throat. Her fingers shift gently over the seams of his sweater, and she leans back, opening her eyes to meet his gaze. She is tempered steel; dangerous and terrifying and beautiful and steadfast and he is suddenly shocked at his profound luck to have her in his life, the prospect of her absence now unbearable.

She thumbs softly over a bruise blossoming across his cheek, and he sighs, swaying into the contact. The painkillers must be starting to kick in, because the sharp throbbing in his head has subsided to a dull roar in the background.

He cannot decipher her expression—her eyes are wide and bright with _something,_ sadness, pity, maybe love—but he chances a smile, torn by grief and mourning yet still warm and sincere. It is all he can do.

She responds in kind, a gentle curve of her lips, and tips forward to embrace him again. The hug is softer this time, calmer, and he presses his cheek to the side of her hade gratefully. She shifts against him, tucking her chin into the dip of his shoulder, and he realizes, all at once and all over again, how terribly he loves her.

“Thank you,” he mumbles into her hair. The words are not enough, they will never be enough, but they are all he can offer at the time. Mako pulls away and kisses his forehead, careful and light.

He falls asleep with Mako curled up against his back, like a protector. It is the first anniversary in three years that he remembers how he got back to a bed.

 


End file.
